been filled with boredom awaiting Shallowsoul's attempts at finding the ranger, but she'd pursued her efforts at finding Shallowsoul's real hiding place. None of those efforts had met with success.
The rooms were elegantly furnished with furniture she had recovered from what had been the finest houses around Myth Drannor. It was a pocket-sized palace, but she knew it was only a gilded boil inside a corpse.
She warded the door behind her as she stepped through into a hallway filled with ruin Two male drow under her command stood watch over her door. They worked in shifts, making sure she was never alone or unprotected in her rooms.
'Malla,' they said in unison, using the drow term for an honored one. The title always made Krystarn smirk.
'Go get the others,' she ordered one of them. She couldn't remember his name.
The drow male hurried away. The remaining one fell into step with her, holding his spear butt just clear of the ground so it wouldn't make any noise.
Krystarn followed the hallway to the other end. No lights lit the walls, but she didn't need them. A wall blocked the end of the hallway. She put her hand out against it, then discovered it was still solid. She remained facing the wall, listening to the others of her entourage fall into lines behind her.
She didn't need to look to make sure they were all there. Twenty-two drow males had followed her from Menzoberranzan, their lives pledged to her task, accepting that she had been placed upon her quest by Lloth, Queen of the Demonweb Pits, herself.
The wall rippled before Krystarn, then pulsed like a great mouth about to open.
'Come.' Shallowsoul's command filled her mind.
'Wait for me,' Krystarn ordered the male drow warriors.
'Yes, Malla,' Captain V'nk'itn responded. 'We shall stand steady.'
Krystarn knew that the male drow wouldn't stand there out of loyalty, but out of fear of her vengeance if they failed. When she had taken them, she had tied their blood to hers; if they fled, she could follow.
She wrapped her fingers around the hilt of the morning star and stepped through the door. Immediately, the rush of cold wind wrapped around her and she went blind and deaf. She felt like a leaf trapped in a treacherous whirlpool in the streams that cut through the Underdark. Yet, at the same time, she maintained her sense of equilibrium.
The darkness cleared like cool fog drifting in from one of the streams leading into Menzoberranzan. Cool air obscured her true Drow vision for a moment.
'Enter.' Shallowsoul's physical voice sounded even worse than his mental one.
Krystarn took exactly two steps forward. As always, the room she appeared in was not one she had been in before. Her heart stilled in her chest as she gazed around at the shelves of books that occupied all four walls and stood in stacks in the center of the large room.
This was what she lusted for, what she had promised Mother Lloth her direct obedience forever after in exchange for her success. A stack of books stood so close to her that she could reach out and touch them if she but moved her arm. But she didn't, because she knew to do so would mean instant death. Shallowsoul allowed no one to touch the books.
She scanned the titles, finding them in a language she did not comprehend. Shallowsoul played his games with her avarice and she knew it. Deliberately, she was teleported of late into rooms of the vast library where she could not read the titles. Thick and pristine, arranged so neatly on the shelves, the books called out to her.
Shallowsoul laughed, and the noise sounded like bones grating, somewhere on the other side of the stacks. 'Even from here I can feel your greed, drow.' His voice sounded like it was squeezed from a narrowly open crypt, deep but somehow still breathless.
'Be glad of it,' Krystarn said. 'Else how would you know I would stay in your thrall?' She let him have his laugh. Every time she saw a new volume that she had not seen before, she carefully recorded the symbols and warped languages she remembered. Already in her bag of holding that never left her side, she possessed a book with dozens of inscriptions.
'It would do you good,' Shallowsoul said, 'to remember who is master in our relationship.'
Krystarn bowed her head in humility. She was a drow female, not born to know the yoke of a man even among her own people, much less to subjugate herself to the whims of such a thing as Folgrim Shallowsoul. A lesser drow, one less committed to Mother Lloth, would have broken. There were some, she knew, who would have mistakenly believed that the Queen of the Demonweb Pits had deserted them.
Instead, Krystarn knew that Lloth was only molding her anger, tempering it into the greatest weapon the Queen of Spiders would ever have in her arsenal. And when the time came to bare that weapon, edged with all the knowledge she would reap from the library, all of Toril would not be safe from her unleashed hatred.
Folgrim Shallowsoul rounded the stack in front of the drow elf and stopped. Tortured nightmares had given him shape, while fierce magic had given him form. Gaunt and skeletal, his gaze burned with the pinpoints of green light surrounded by the black emptiness nesting inside the eye sockets. A fistful of dead white hair stuck to his head in a long, unkempt mane that trailed down his back. Blue-green dead flesh clung to its skull, stubbornly giving it features in spite of the immutability of nature. The lips had peeled back from its teeth, giving Shallowsoul a permanent sneering grimace.
He wore clothes of nobility, the cloth interwoven with fine strands of gold and silver, spotted with sapphire chips worked in intricate patterns. Over the long decades, the clothing had rotted and become tattered.
He held a volume in one hand. A long taloned finger with skin so thin the bone showed through marked his place. 'You remember Baylee Arnvold?' he asked.
'Fannt Golsway's apprentice,' Krystarn answered, knowing Shallowsoul should know by now that she never forgot anything.
'Yes. He is at a forgathering. You're aware of what that is?'
'A forgathering is a meeting place of rangers.' Krystarn waited, knowing from experience that Shallowsoul would not tell her his news until he was ready.
'This one is called the Glass Eye Concourse,' Shallowsoul went on. He walked through the stacks, motioning Krystarn to follow.
The drow elf waited a step before trailing. Shallowsoul was a lich, and as such he radiated an aura of cold and darkness that unsettled even her nerves. Immediately, she felt the wall of freezing despair lift from her, and it seemed as though a thousand pounds had dropped from her shoulders.
'There will be hundreds of rangers at this forgathering.' Shallowsoul reached out and meticulously straightened one of the books on a shelf where the corners did not quite overlap.
Krystarn took full opportunity to gaze at all the shelves of books. The room was even more vast than she had imagined. Twenty paces in now, and she still couldn't see the other side of it.
Only one wall was visible to her left. It soared up thirty feet before meeting the ceiling. A wheeled ladder hooked to the shelves ran all the way to the top, allowing a person to climb up to reach the highest volumes.
The two walls visible to her through the gaps in the intricate shelving looked like stone. The drow believed the vast library had been initially buried underground, not sunk there as the magic of the Army of Darkness had stricken the city and the protective mythal had come apart.
The room appeared to conform to no real shape as well, furthering her suspicions that the library had been deliberately designed to confuse any who entered it. Fragments in scrolls that she had found that spoke of the library had mentioned maps being necessary to find a way through.
Without those maps, even the parts of the library that Krystarn had seen would require years to merely catalog, even without getting into the content. Once in, if a searcher allowed himself or herself to be pulled in too far, there would be no return.
'I want you to find Baylee Arnvold and kill him,' Shallowsoul ordered.
'When?' Krystarn asked.
'Now.' The lich rounded another stack and the way widened, leading to a high desk in front of a tall stool. A large book occupied the center of the desk, the pages still wet with ink. A quill and an ink pot sat to one side.
Krystarn surveyed the writing, finding it like nothing she'd seen before in all her studies. Liches were undead, usually long removed from any vestiges of humanity. Once she'd discovered Shallowsoul's true nature, she'd studied about liches. One of the key points of Su'vann'k'tr of the House Fla'nvm's writings, was that liches often created brand new magic items and spells that no one had heard of before. Removed from the driving needs
